Western intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s has enabled Islamic extremism, including Wahhabism, to penetrate into the former Yugoslavia.
By Boba Borojevic
Four members of an ultraconservative Muslim sect, known as Wahhabis, have been arrested following a raid on a mountain terrorist training camp in the Rashka region of south-western Serbia on March 18. A large supply of weapons, ammunition, hand grenades, facemasks and plastic explosive with detonators was also discovered at a cave at Ninaja Mountain, 30 kilometres from Novi Pazar.
A judge ordered the four to be detained for 30 days to allow police and intelligence officials to investigate their alleged activities at the training site. Dragan Jocic, the Serbian interior affairs minister, said: “We are determined to prevent any form of violence and terrorism. We are continuing to comb the terrain and search for other members of the group.”
Wahhabism, a new threat to the Serbian society at large
Srdja Trifkvic, an expert on this subject is the author of two books on Islam, “ Defeating Jihad” and “The Sword of the Prophet.” He cautions that Wahhabi terrorism is by no means the only form of jihad that threatens the rest of the world:
Jihad is an integral Islamic concept, built into its basic tenets and common to all Islamic activists, regardless of whether they regard themselves as followers of Wahhabism or not. Jihad, the holy war, is inseparable from the mainstream teaching of orthodox Islam from the earliest days of Muhammad’s career until our own time. It is therefore not an exclusive province of Wahhabi teaching and practice. Let it be noted that people who are “Wahhabists” do not use that term to describe themselves. The followers of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahab, the Saudi theologian and Islamic thinker who lived around 1703 to 1792, usually describe themselves as “Unitarians,” or else as “Salafis,” meaning followers of pious forefathers – although not all Salafis are necessarily Wahhabists.
Origins and teaching of Wahhabism
It is almost three centuries since Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was born, but his legacy is alive and well. Wahhab was a zealous Muslim revivalist (b. 1703) who lived in the period of the Ottoman Empire’s early decline. He considered that Islam in general, and Arabia in particular, needed to be spiritually and literally purified and returned to the true tenets of the faith. From the Sufis he took the concept of a fraternal religious order, but rejected initiation rituals and music in any form. He also condemned the decorations of mosques and sinful frivolities such as smoking tobacco. He gave rise to a movement that sees itself as the guardian of “true” Islamic values. His ideas were espoused in the Book of Unity, which gave rise to the name of the movement, al-Muwahhidun, or Unitarians.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, Wahhab found a politically powerful backer for his religious cause. In 1744 he struck a partnership with Muhammad ibn-Saud, the leader of a powerful clan in central Arabia, and moved to his “capital,” the settlement of ad-Dir’yah (Riyadh). Since that time the fortunes of the Wahhabis and the Ibn Saud family have been intertwined. Under Ibn-Saud’s successor, Abdul-Aziz, the Wahhabis struck out of their desert base at Najd with fury unseen in a millennium. In what looked for a while like the repetition of Muhammad’s and the early Caliphs’ phenomenal success a thousand years earlier, they temporarily captured Mecca and Medina and marched into Mesopotamia, forcing the Ottoman governor to negotiate humiliating terms, and invaded Syria. This was an unacceptable challenge to the Sultan, the heir to the caliphate and “protector of the holy places.” In 1818 the Turks broke the first Wahhabi state.
http://www.serbianna.com/columns/borojevic/054.shtml